


Commemoration

by Tierfal



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Established Relationship, Fluff, Laboratories, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-25
Updated: 2012-11-25
Packaged: 2017-11-19 13:44:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,899
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/573898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The lab sort-of-kind-of goes to hell on the worst possible day.</p>
<p>[Set post-Brotherhood but free of any real spoilers!]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Commemoration

**Author's Note:**

> Signs of Roy/Ed fluff addiction may include squeeing, cooing, and writing crap all day on Thanksgiving.

Ed manages not to gnash his teeth when the phone rings; the damn thing is so loud that Gemma startles and almost drops _another_ test tube—

“Elric lab,” he forces out through the automatic clench of his jaw. “Make it fuckin’ qui—”

“Ah,” Roy says.

And that’s enough to jog Ed’s memory, and the dawning of it feels like a bucket of icewater being upended in the middle of his chest.

“Shit,” he says. “Shit, shit, shit, _shit_ —”

“It’s really all ri—”

“It’s not fucking all right!” Ed scrubs a hand down his face, trying to peel off the panic trilling through his nerves. No luck there. No fucking luck anywhere today. “I just—I swear to _God_ I meant to get home early, but it’s just—”

Ed glances over, and Gemma ducks her head, and her hands shake a little as she wires up the gel electrophoresis boxes again.

“—there was… we had a little—accident in the lab, and… had to start this whole stage over.”

“That sounds like a rather large accident,” Roy says.

Ed hates that voice. Roy has six thousand voices with several tones each, and this is the one he hates the _most_ , because it’s either the calm-to-cover-rage one or the calm-because-it’s-fine one, and Ed can _never fucking tell_.

“Well,” he says, “yeah.” There’s a vacuum stirring in his chest, opening up, dragging at his organs, sucking at his skin until even his bones start to ache. “I just—I’m—sorry. I’m sorry; I didn’t—”

“It’s all right,” Roy says again, more softly now. “No one’s hurt?”

Ed might have a steam burn on his cheek, but that’s pretty standard. “No.”

“No irreparable damage?”

Well, Gemma’s probably going to be jumping every time Ed looks at her for a week, but… “Guess not.”

“Then it’s all right.”

Ed cradles the phone receiver to his ear with his shoulder and stretches the cord as he sidles over to check on the temperature of the reagent for Phase Look It Starts When I Tell You It Starts Okay. “Except it’s—Roy, I really—I really _wanted_ to—it was all I was thinking about this morning, I mean it; I wanted—”

“Intentions do matter, Edward,” Roy says. “Truthfully, it’s all right. I only just got in, myself—the transportation committee meeting ran agonizingly long and went about as smoothly as the roads themselves.” He lets out one of those breath-laugh-sighs he likes so much. “It seems sort of fitting, doesn’t it, that we’re apart on our anniversary because both of us are such slaves to our ambitions?”

Gingerly Ed turns the bunsen burner down a little, and the phone’s cord pulls taut, and its base starts to slide towards the edge of the table. “I guess maybe it’s fitting. Mostly it’s shit.”

“It is that. Are you going to be long?”

Ed wants to lie and then maybe try to make the lie true, but getting Roy’s hopes up for nothing always ends up sucking more in the end. “Yeah. All night, probably.”

Gemma actually _whimpers_. It makes Ed feel—well, fucking awful. Because he yelled, obviously, and shouted a whole lot of not-very-nice shit as all of the glass was breaking, because he could just _see_ all of the hours of work shattering on the floor, and he was already thinking about how long it would take to reassemble everything without cutting any corners and whether they could still line up the timing just right, but—he was just stressed. And he didn’t… threaten her with bodily harm or anything. And he didn’t _mean_ it.

Except… he knows, by now, what words do to people. That’s one of the billion-and-some things he’s learned from Roy, over time—how much words can matter. To him, ‘fuck’ or ‘bastard’ or a whole string of expletives are just sequences of letters, like any other, like ‘cat’ or ‘hydrochloric’ or ‘shoelace’. But to lots of people, they’re more than that. They’re powerful. And lots of people use words like ‘fuck’ and ‘bastard’ as weapons, and of _course_ waving a bunch of weapons around in front of somebody like Gemma after she fucks up is going to make her scared.

And even counting today, she’s still the best lab underling he’s ever gotten saddled with. He doesn’t want her to be scared. Definitely not of him.

“It’s fine, though,” he says clearly into the phone, even though it’s obviously not. He turns towards her. “Hey, kiddo—”

Gemma’s head jerks up, and her eyes are huge and suspiciously shiny. Fuck, this might need an apology note. _Goddamnit Gemma I wasn’t saying YOU were shit I was saying the situation was shit because it was, and it’s not like anybody died and please stop feeling bad, it makes me feel bad too. Sincerely Ed._ Why can’t people just infer that part and save him a ton of time?

“You should really go home,” he says. “You’ve…” Broken enough crap for one day, thanks. “…gotta be tired, right? Just… tomorrow will be better, okay?”

Gemma nods so vigorously that her glasses slip down her nose.

“Okay,” Ed says, kind of awkwardly, because _crap_ , did he turn her into a mute? “Just… you’re… a good kid, okay? Go get some rest. Tomorrow we’ll kick this thing’s ass.”

Fuckshitdamn, she’s totally mute now; she nods some more, straightens the electrophoresis boxes, and makes a break for the door. Can Marcoh fix vocal cords?

“G’night,” Ed says helplessly.

“G-goodn-n-night, P-P-Professor Elri—El—”

And the sobs start as she books it out the hallway, and Ed’s stomach twists up and lurches back and forth like it’s trying to get out of his body.

“You’re adorable,” Roy says, and up until then Ed had actually forgotten he was on the phone.

“Shut up,” he says. “I am not.”

“I think we’ll have to agree to disagree on that point,” Roy says.

“Diplomacy in fuckin’ action.”

“That’s adorable, too.”

“Shut _up_.”

“But you didn’t even send her off so that we could have anniversary phone sex,” Roy says with that curl of _heat_. That’s… well, that’s Ed’s favorite of his voices. “You did it because you care about her.”

“…ph… phone sex?”

“Dearest.”

“Phone… sex…”

“Focus, Ed. Tend to your incomprehensibly complicated experiment.”

“…then phone sex?”

“Why don’t you call me when you have a few minutes of downtime?”

“…phone…”

“Edward. Science.”

Ed blinks, shakes his head, and clears his throat. “Can’t I have both?”

Roy—laughs, softly, warmly, genuinely, unguarded. All right, honestly, _that’s_ Ed’s favorite voice. Maybe it’s sappy, but it’s true.

“It _is_ our anniversary,” Roy says. “Call me later. Your work is important; I know that. I’ll see you when I see you, shall I?”

“Yeah,” Ed says. “I, um—happy anniversary, Roy.”

“And you.”

Ed hangs up the phone, opens the dry ice freezer, sticks his face into the frigid sublimation fog, and reels his brain back in.

It’s been seven years since Roy bought Ed’s allegiance with a pocket watch, and it’s been two years since the bastard exchanged an invitation to a nice restaurant for Ed’s whole heart.

Ed really, really, _really_ wanted not to fuck it up this time. Last year, Roy had to go to West City to deal with, of all fucking things, _chimera_ smugglers, and Ed dragged Al up from Rush Valley to watch the lab for a week and went with him. And because Ed’s luck is perpetually in the shitter, they celebrated their first anniversary by diving out of an exploding warehouse and getting shot at and all of the usual crap—although they _did_ commemorate the occasion so vigorously in the hotel room that night that Roy refused to get up before noon the next day, and they missed their train.

But he wanted it to be… normal… this year. For once. There’s not much about either of their lives that’s _normal_ , and that must wear Roy right down to raw nerve endings some days.

Seven years, two years, and at least he has phone sex to look forward to, but he was hoping to be able to give _more_ ; he’s kind of crap at phone sex anyway, and…

…and half an hour later, there’s a knock on the door to the lab. His shout of “ _Fuck off_!” goes unheeded, because Roy strolls in with a bag of takeout and a grin that’s a come-on all by itself.

“You’re a sneaky _bastard_ ,” Ed says.

Roy kisses the tip of his nose and clears a space on the worktop for the food. “And you’re adorable.”

“I’m not adorable.”

Roy smiles as he shifts a few more pieces of glassware. “I respectfully disagree.”

Ed can’t stop watching his hands. Roy has quite possibly the nicest hands of anybody on the entire planet, fat white saber scars and all—they’re big, strong, sure hands, confident hands, with thick tendons and peaked knuckles and calloused fingertips so gentle sometimes that they almost feel like liquid on Ed’s skin. And maybe it’s wrong, or possessive, or presumptuous, but it makes his whole chest swell with pride when he remembers that _Roy_ chose _him_ —of everyone those hands could settle on, of everyone in the world, _he_ is the one who has _Roy Mustang_ ’s undivided attention. Every time Roy puts those hands in his hair, on his shoulders, on his back—every time Roy touches him—the equivalencies of the universe just slide into _balance_.

Roy is still rearranging all of the scattered notes and assorted lab-emergency detritus; a couple test tubes clink against each other as he sweeps them aside. He’s opened up a half-circle with a three-foot diameter, and just before Ed can ask what in the everloving hell is so interesting about the worktop, he turns.

He sets his hands on Ed’s hips, pushes him back against the edge of the workbench, grips his ass _just_ hard enough to make Ed’s spine tighten, lifts him up onto the countertop, and spreads those hands on his thighs instead.

“It’s our anniversary,” Roy murmurs, nudging Ed’s knees apart to fit his body between them. “If you need to be here all night, then I’ll be here all night with you.”

There’s a tingly sort of heat sparking through every cell in Ed’s body as he reaches out and curls his fingers in Roy’s collar. What has he ever done to earn this?

“Won’t that fuck up your whole day tomorrow?” he asks. He feels like he has to acknowledge the sacrifice despite the fact that he’d probably tie Roy to the radiator if the bastard tried to leave.

“Maybe by this time next year,” Roy says, leaning in, running his mouth slowly up the side of Ed’s neck, “I will finally have convinced you that you don’t fuck things up, Ed; you _light_ them up.”

“Thought that was your job,” Ed says over the thudding of his heart in his ears. “You’re General Pyro, after all.”

“General Pryo,” Roy says, hot breath against his mouth, hot eyes fixed on his and irresistible, “will never be too busy for you.”

Ed licks his lips. “It’s gonna be a long night. I hope.”

Roy grins. “I hope so, too.”

Roy’s kiss tastes like coffee and safety and all the things he doesn’t have to say, and Ed thinks maybe normalcy is overrated anyway.

Waiting-for-the-Gel-to-Set/Anniversary Sex, though, is definitely not.


End file.
